In Covid walks through central London, I have found myself collecting pavilions and bandstands. And longing for them to be put to good use. They are structures unlike any others: halfway between the outside world we crave and the domestic interior to which we have been urged to retreat. They are often beautiful – flashing their finials – and often neglected, with mossy roofs and scuzzy floors.
Occasionally, they are commandeered. The bandstand on Clapham Common was the natural place for people to gather after Sarah Everard’s death. Pavilions in Sheffield and Bath are apparently in demand for weddings. I have seen boxers springing around on the bandstand in Regent’s Park, which, in 1982, was bombed by the IRA while the Royal Green Jackets played extracts from Oliver!. The marvellous stand in Arnold Circus in east London is an essential meeting place.
While theatres and concert halls are closed, surely these structures, which provide some shelter for performers and plenty of ventilation for an audience, should be co-opted for small-scale productions? As large sections of our cities are privatised, and spookily patrolled by security guards, we need to claim and illuminate the public spaces we still have.
Public whitewash
“Public” is becoming an increasingly difficult word to pin down. It is never more slippery than when applied to schools, which becomes evident as soon as you try to explain to a non-Brit that a “public” school is actually private. The pandemic has, for a moment, laid bare the terrible abysm in our education system: I would be surprised if any cabinet minister’s child has been catch-up tutored by a 17-year-old in Sri Lanka. So I return to something that has nagged me for years. Let’s start putting our mouths where our money is. And referring to non-state education simply as “fee-paying”. Anything else is just sanitising.
Radio wonderlands
On Friday, BBC Radio held its (virtual) Audio Drama awards ceremony. As a judge in the “best adaptation” category, I was bowled over by the winner, Tom Stoppard’s The Voyage of the St Louis, which showed how effortlessly radio can roll between continents and eras. It made me want to revive a proposal dreamed up with a friendly producer a few years ago: that Radio 3 should put on August Wilson’s tremendous “Pittsburgh Cycle” of plays, which dramatically charts the experience of black Americans through the 20th century.
Denzel Washington is setting about filming these individually but, as far as I can discover, the entire set has never been performed in one season over here. It is a mighty undertaking, not least because Wilson constantly shifts between documentary and dream. Still, radio can switch easily from realism to apocalyptic imaginings. There could not be a better time to consider which playwrights are central to 20th-century drama – and to look hard at US history.
Fight club
I have seen a lot of feeble fights on stage, with wagging hands making soft landings on hysterically appalled faces. The work of Kate Waters, one of only two women on the Equity register of fight directors, has been a revelation. She has galvanised the duel in Hamlet, made a bar-room brawl erupt feet away from audiences in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and is regularly called in to organise a ruckus at the Rovers in Coronation Street. She can send energy zipping through a scene, though what she does is invisible and seldom credited; you don’t see a cleverly crafted series of moves, but emotion gathered into action, a plot running its inevitable course.
During the pandemic, Waters has been campaigning on behalf of her fellow freelance theatre workers, many left without income. She has also been running Zoom fight classes. In my Covid 3am fantasies, I sometimes think of asking to join. Until theatre returns.
• Susannah Clapp is the theatre critic of the Observer
